How Gwendolyn Brooks is still shaping poetry in Chicago two decades after her death
Brooks, who died in 2000 at age 83, was well known for mentoring young poets and writers. Several are paying that investment forward.
By Char Daston
How Gwendolyn Brooks is still shaping poetry in Chicago two decades after her death
Brooks, who died in 2000 at age 83, was well known for mentoring young poets and writers. Several are paying that investment forward.
By Char DastonAsk a poet, particularly a Chicago poet, and they’ll likely tell you Gwendolyn Brooks was as influential to poetry as Langston Hughes, Allen Ginsberg and Robert Frost.
In Chicago, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet’s June birthday merits annual celebration. This month, the Poetry Foundation chose Blacks, an anthology of much of her important work, for its “One Poem, One Chicago” series. And Chicago publisher Third World Press partnered with the Poetry Foundation to ensure new readers can discover her, issuing a new printing of Blacks.
More than two decades after her death at the age of 83, Brooks continues to exert influence on a younger generation of poets and writers. At the height of her career, she abandoned her big-time publisher Harper & Row and chose to work exclusively with Black-owned presses, including the then-fledgling Chicago publisher Third World Press.
This move helped her deepen her ties with younger Black writers and with the city’s South Side.
Several writers influenced by Brooks say they now pay forward the lessons they learned from the formidable poet — who was at one time Illinois’ poet laureate and “poetry consultant” to the U.S. Library of Congress — about mentoring children and writing about important moments in Black lives and Black history.
“So many poets I’ve known credit Mama Brooks as an African American woman who the canon shifted to make space for,” says avery r. young, who was named Chicago’s first poet laureate in April. “Because that space was open, it allowed so many others to be in that space.”
Here’s how poets and writers say her influence continues in Chicago and beyond.
avery r. young
Brooks made regular visits to elementary, middle and high schools throughout her career. Young, who had just started writing himself, was inspired by the respect she showed for writing, even by the youngest of children.
Writing, he realized, gave him a way to voice his opinions in a way that would make older people listen.
“I learned at 8 that if I took all the sassiness that was coming out my mouth naturally and put it into a poem, people were way more accepting of the poem than they were of me just talking out of turn,” he said.
As an adult, young began reading at the same events as Brooks, and she took notice. After one event, she invited him to dinner at her favorite restaurant in Chinatown. Over dinner, Brooks told him to continue developing his voice — his poems attempt to convey African American English in a unique textual style.
“In regard to the code or dialect that I write most of [my] poems in, she was encouraging me to really figure that out and master that, because there was something there.”
Today, much like the poet who inspired him, young visits schools all over the Chicago area to teach poetry. He starts lessons by showing them the potential of dialect and sound in poetry and by asking them to read aloud Brooks’s poem “We Real Cool” (“We real cool. We / Left school. We…”).
His former students include award-winning Chicago poet Nate Marshall, who represents a next generation of poets trained by Brooks’s work.
As Chicago Poet Laureate, young said he hopes his first project will be to ask Chicagoans to write their own poems inspired by the poetry in Blacks.
“We’re going to start with the youth,” he said.
Quraysh Ali Lansana
As part of his job, he said, “I had the honor of picking her up and driving her to the Old Hothouse on Milwaukee Avenue, and of course escorting her home.” On those drives, he remembers, “we began to talk about the things I was interested in and what I was doing.”
These conversations led to Brooks hiring the young Lansana to help run some of her Illinois Poet Laureate programs — and to a lasting friendship between the two writers. When Lansana decided to finish college in the late 1990s, he enrolled at Chicago State University, where Third World Press publisher Haki Madhubuti had founded the Gwendolyn Brooks Center for Black Literature and Creative Writing.
Brooks taught one poetry workshop there each year, and Lansana enrolled in her final class before retirement.
“I still have a folder of poems dripping with red ink,” he said, chuckling.
Brooks was an exacting editor, but also a dynamic teacher with colorful strategies to inspire her students’ writing.
“She liked to ignite what I call ‘mind riots,’ ” Lansana says. “She would throw ideas out on the table and watch us scrapple for these ideas. She introduced writing in form. She assigned sonnets, she assigned sestinas, as well as allowing us to write in free verse. One of the exercises that I still borrow today: Ms. Brooks was not a fan of profanity. She considered profanity a poverty of imagination. [She assigned us to] develop creative insults without using profanity.”
Of the many creative assignments in the class, perhaps the most memorable to Lansana involved what Brooks called “verse journalism.” She would save rubber-banded stacks of newspaper clippings and bring them to class as fodder for poems. “She also had us pursue our own newspaper clippings,” Lansana says.
This assignment reflects Brooks’s commitment to writing about important moments in Black lives and Black history. Her own poems that reflect her deep attention to the news include “The Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock” and “A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, a Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon,” an astonishing duo of poems told from the perspectives of both Mamie Till Mobley and Carolyn Bryant, whose lie led to 14-year-old Emmett Till’s lynching.
Today, Lansana teaches English and creative writing at the University of Tulsa in his native Oklahoma, where he uses some of Brooks’s teaching techniques, like the curse-free insult assignment. He also continues Brooks’s tradition of “verse journalism,” publishing a book of poems on Harriet Tubman with Third World Press and making radio and television programs about Black history and culture. In 2022, he won an Emmy award for a documentary he hosted commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre.
Kelly Norman Ellis
Ellis particularly appreciates Brooks’s commitment to writing about people and places from Chicago.
“I lived here in Chicago until I was 2 years old, and then we moved back to Mississippi. I have a lot of family here, [so] I’m kind of a reverse [Great] Migration. I would read Gwendolyn Brooks and ask my family, ‘What’s a kitchenette building?’ and they would go, ‘Oh!’ [Brooks] reminded me so much about the importance of this city.”
Reading poems set within the Black community of Chicago is also important to Ellis’s creative writing students.
“When I bring in writers like Gwendolyn Brooks, students say, ‘Hey, wait a minute! I know where that is!’ or, ‘I didn’t know this about Beverly. I live there and I didn’t know the history of it.’ I remember years ago I taught a group of young girls in Bronzeville. We read some poems from A Street in Bronzeville. When they realized that this famous poet had written about their neighborhood, it kind of changed the vibe in the class. It freed them up to start writing about themselves.”
Today, Ellis continues to teach poetry writing that is based in place and history at Chicago State University. She also serves as the poetry editor at Third World Press, the publishing house that established itself in part by becoming Brooks’s main publisher in the late 1960s.
In this role, Ellis says she looks specifically for poets who write in Brooks’s “verse journalism” tradition.
“How do they write about community? How do they write about tradition? Also, are they concerned with world events?”
Gwendolyn Brooks’s “love of community,” she said, still guides her.
Get to know Gwendolyn Brooks this summer
Char Daston has covered education and culture for WBEZ. This summer he will join the staff of Nashville Public Radio. Follow him @behindthissky on Twitter.
Ysa Quiballo contributed reporting.